-Chemical Education News & Announcements-

Welcome to the ACS Division of Chemical Education website. Here you can keep up-to-date with activities, news, and opportunities in chemical education. Do you have something interesting you'd like to share with the Division? Let us know!

Tom Connelly (ACS Executive Director and CEO) posed several questions about safety culture in an ACS Comment in C&ENews in the June 27, 2016 issue. In September, Rod Bennett (DAC Chair), invited all ACS Technical Divisions to submit responses to these questions. Cathy Middlecamp forward the request to the CHED Safety Committee. A sub-group of the Safety Committee crafted a response which was subsequently modified a bit and endorsed by the CHED Executive Committee. The response is posted here and will more permanently be linked at the Safety Committee website.

Congratulations! You worked hard and finished your degree and are now ready to put all your dedication and hard work to practice. In other words, you need to get a job. A real one. Scanning through pages of ambiguous job postings, you are not sure what jobs entail, what are the qualifications (what does “or related field” really mean, anyway?), and how to filter those for which you can be competitive. Added to the fish-out-of-water feeling, you may have other restrictions of location or coordinating a job hunt with a significant other (see “Navigating the Two-Body Problem”). Applying for jobs can be daunting, especially when you are in the middle of finishing up your Ph.D. program, post-doctoral fellowship, or teaching 5 classes a semester. Your application writing will most likely not happen in a nice coffee shop during the morning, but at night, while your friends/significant other are laughing at the new season of Orange is the New Black. But there is good news! Actually, two very good bits of news for you. Good news bit one: your degree sets you apart from most applicants, which is HUGE in the screening process. The second bit of good news is there is a process that can maximize your success in your job hunt (see below).

The 2016 Spring ConfChem online conference has begun. The title of this conference is "Science, Disarmament, and Diplomacy in Chemical Education: The Example of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons". This conference will run May 2 - June 30, 2016. Visit http://confchem.ccce.divched.org/2016SpringConfChem to participate.

Fresh from graduate school, I was really looking forward to my first shot at teaching at the University of Iowa. Being a visiting assistant professor was finallymytime where I could exercise autonomy and teach the class how I wanted to teach it. No more being a teaching assistant where everything was prescribed for me, no more asking anyone else “is it okay if a student does x, y, or z?”

If you see a fork in the road, take it! As a beginning researcher wondering how I was going to make anything out of my interest in chemistry education, the international travel award from the CHED International Activities Committee was just such a fork. And boy, am I glad I took it!